Interdisciplinary PhD Awards 2016 Award Summaries

Posted on 9 December 2016

Details of ReCSS funding awards

The ReCSS Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Award scheme is designed to encourage interdisciplinary engagement and related activities by doctoral students in the Social Sciences. The 2016 scheme awarded funds to the York Policy Review and to the Reshaping Multiculturalism Through Cultural Practices ESRC WRDTC Interdisciplinary Network, to host their event ''Difference not Deviance'.

Applications for the 2017 fund are now open. Applications must be received by Monday 12 December 2016. Details of how to apply can be found at ReCSS Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Award Scheme 2017

Difference not Deviance

On the 24th of May 2016, the Reshaping Multiculturalism Through Cultural Practices ESRC WRDTC Interdisciplinary Network hosted their final event entitled “Difference not Deviance”. The title of the event, and the occasion itself, was inspired by a quotation taken from Audre Lorde’s essay ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’:

“Too often we pour the energy needed for recognising and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.”

The aim of this event was to foster productive discussions and encourage interdisciplinary reflection on what it means to be seen as “deviating” from the norm in modern societies.

Our first speaker Dr Shamira Meghani began her talk with a discussion of Lorde’s poem ‘Coping’, and segued into a conversation about how Muslim communities in British society are plagued by a media and political discourse that homogenises them and brands them as regressive, particularly regarding issues such as gay rights.

Our second speaker, Dr Suryia Nayak, offered an in-depth discussion of the etymology and multiple interpretations of the word “deviant”, and asked how we can use this concept to be critical of practices that exclude those who are supposedly “different” from societal norms.

Our chairs, Dr Claire Chambers and Dr Say Burgin, led the post-talk discussion, and conversations were initiated by students, academics and members of the public about how we talk about racial and religious difference in British society, with particular attention being paid to the ongoing rise of Islamophobia in British society.

Overall the event proved fruitful as it encouraged both interdisciplinary discussions into important sociological and political concerns and an appreciation of how Lorde’s work can help us to think through these pertinent issues.

The event was well attended, drawing approximately forty students and academics from across the social science and humanities departments in York, Leeds, Sheffield and further afar. Many attendees expressed enthusiasm for the ideas expressed by our speakers, and a desire for the continuation of these discussions after the event.

We’d like to extend our gratitude to the Research Centre for the Social Sciences for funding this event.

Hannah Kershaw, Katie Markham, and Azeezat Johnson

York Policy Review

The York Policy Review is the UK’s first Graduate Social Policy journal (check it out at www.yorkpolicyreview.co.uk!), and its founding members are drawn from across the University of York’s social science departments. With most of the editorial board being based in the ReCSS, we work across departments to try and bring graduate social science research into the open with our online and print editions.

Having already published our first edition, we applied to the ReCSS Interdiscplinary Fund to support our future development through improving our online platform (did I mention you can check it out at http://www.yorkpolicyreview.co.uk/ ?) and through supporting the dissemination of our second edition. I’ll outline each in turn.

Before receiving the funding, the York Policy Review online platform hosted articles on single webpages, with the text and referencing added directly onto the page. Aside from the aesthetics, there are two key limitations of this approach:

The journal articles could not be listed on Google Scholar or other platforms which require a consistent retrieval mechanism for the article file; namely, webpages alone are not sufficient to populate the search functions on their systems. Some form of coherent file management is required to allow automatic indexing and the retrieval of the articles through the databases.
Hosting the articles as general files makes citation from the journal more difficult, due to the lack of page numbers presented and the lack of facility to download the file, and has knock-on effects with our rankings in the general Google Search.

The funding award supported the purchase of a PDF viewer plugin licence, allowing for a bespoke PDF viewer for the articles hosted on our online platform. Have a look on our website to see the outcome of the process: a branded PDF display which adheres to the requirements of Google Scholar and ProQuest indexation. The journal will now be indexed in Google Scholar (pending their application processing period, which is currently ongoing).

The interdisciplinary fund also supported a print run for our second edition: a total of 60 copies. As a journal, our default position is to publish online only – we do not as a rule require print publication of all of our editions. We find, however, that having print editions is a very effective marketing tool for when we advertise the journal at events or WRDTC workshops.

We have published a special edition focused on the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and already have secured finalised submissions for an edition – with a broad focus on drug policy – to be launched in Easter 2017. Both of these developments have followed from this marketing activity, of which hard copy journals have been a key part.